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SRE Is the Most Innovative Approach to ITSM Since ITIL®

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For over a decade, ITIL has been the leading ITSM framework adopted by enterprises across the globe. So, what is driving a rapidly increasing interest in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) as a service management alternative?

In its own words, Google refers to SRE as its approach to service management: “The SRE team is responsible for the availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response and capacity planning.”

In traditional ITSM terms, the role of the SRE is responsible for service level, change, availability, event, incident, problem, capacity, performance, infrastructure and platform management. While the operational practice areas may be similar, there are significant differences in how the practices are approached.

ITIL4 Framework Compared to SRE

Released in 2019, the newest update to ITIL4 remains a complex governance model with four dimensions, seven guiding principles, a Service Value System and 34 processes (now renamed as practices). While ITIL4 pays homage to Agile and DevOps, there is little depth in the publications released to date—to be fair, several other publications in the series are in queue for gradual release. The framework spans just about every aspect of software delivery and operations and seemingly is trying to be the single source of truth in both principle and practice for IT management.

SRE Is More Closely Aligned to Agile and DevOps

By comparison, SRE focuses specifically on the reliability and resilience of complex production system operations. As an engineering discipline, SRE more closely aligns with the Agile and DevOps patterns that are being adopted by product development teams including continuous integration, testing, delivery, and deployment. SREs bring the wisdom of production into the teams thereby breaking down many of the silo walls that have impeded IT for so long.

As a service management alternative, SRE also updates traditional ITSM activities with innovative and self-organizing concepts such as management to service level objectives, error budgets, toil reduction, release engineering, monitoring/observability and embracing risk as neutral approaches to service management. The core SRE book provides practical and actionable guidance for Site Reliability Engineers on managing incidents, learning from failure, testing for reliability, load balancing, handling different types of emergencies, software engineering, and capacity planning. Related publications such as the Site Reliability Engineering Workbook and Seeking SRE provide additional insight.

Most importantly, a Site Reliability Engineer is an actual hireable job with a defined role, set of responsibilities and skills. SREs and SRE teams are encouraged to be creative, accountable and must spend 50% of their time reducing toil by engineering automation in order to make tomorrow better than today. Like Agile and DevOps, SRE supports self-regulation with policies and consequences. In fact, some consider SRE to be the third piece of the Develop (Agile), Deploy (DevOps), Operate (SRE) feedback loop.

What This Means for the “Humans of DevOps” in Operations and ITSM

SRE is breathing new life and opening new career paths for operations and ITSM professionals who a few years ago were battling against the mantra of “NoOps.” According to Linkedin’s 2020 Emerging Jobs Report, SRE is the fifth fastest-growing job role with 34% growth.

Services will always need to be managed. However, competing in a digital age requires new ways of working and thinking with speed and quality as key metrics. Agility must be instilled across the value stream spectrum in order to increase flow and deliver an exemplary customer experience. Your organization may not be as complex as Google’s, but the principles and practices of SRE are applicable to all environments.

You can read the Site Reliability Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering Workbook publications for free from Google. For those wanting to learn more about the practices and patterns associated with SRE, DevOps Institute recently released its Site Reliability Foundation certification with accredited training being offered globally by its Global Registered Education Partner network. Either way, if you are an operations or ITSM professional, I would highly recommend learning more about SRE. It is the future of ITSM as we cross the digital divide.

To learn more; check out this webinar, and consider the following ITSM Academy certification course:


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